D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[TiQuinn]

I see plenty of guys reading when I’m at the gym or on vacation - times where you see other people reading. Stuff like Jack Carr, Harlen Coben, John Sanford, Mark Greaney, Warhammer and Star Wars books, etc.

The men reading less than women trend has zero to do with access to material that suits one’s tastes.

 

[Clint_L]

Yet that still supports my hypothesis that Men seek out different stories than Women. Maybe the foundational reason is due to gender bias but that is not changing how the market bears out. At this current state it is obvious that Men and Women as marketing demographics choose different kinds of stories.

This is basically flirting with becoming a nature/nurture debate, which is probably not going to prove super fruitful.

As previously I mentioned, citing the example of assumptions that TSR made about D&D's gender appeal, relying on assumptions about who should enjoy what can be a failing strategy. Texts that stand the test of time do so because they are well written and broadly engaged with themes that are of interest to most human beings.

Jane Austen has been mentioned in a lot of recent posts in this thread. I love and have read all of her published work, and I'm a cisgender dude. Why? Well, she's one of the most skilled, subtle satirists to have written in English. Her subtle skewering of social mannerisms, gendered relationships, and class assumptions remains relevant today; c.f. Bridgerton (e.g. Austen with less subtlety and more sex), or just about any good teen movie. Then, she somehow manages to pair satire with swoony romance, no easy feat - these are generally antithetical genre! And she's a helluva wordsmith; the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice remains one of the great first lines in literature. Today, she is probably more popular with women readers than men, but has no shortage of fans among the latter, because quality wins out.

Or consider Tolkien's LotR. This is a text which is almost entirely concerned with a bunch of dudes on a mission, but there are probably as many female and non-binary LotR fans as male. Everyone can relate to the plucky underdogs standing up for what's right against an omnipresent malevolence, everyone loves a story about true friendship being put to the test, and mythic journeys resonate with all human beings.

You can write good books that are targeted at a particular definition of a particular audience. But I maintain that the best writers and best texts don't focus on such things. They just focus on telling good stories for all people.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Because men have been taught that reading romance makes them insufficiently macho, and most are too insecure not to conform (or at least admitting to it).

Some if it is also that we are different. And it is okay for men to gravitate towards certain things, for women to gravitate towards other things. It is also okay for people to like whatever they like.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is basically flirting with becoming a nature/nurture debate, which is probably not going to prove super fruitful.

As previously I mentioned, citing the example of assumptions that TSR made about D&D's gender appeal, relying on assumptions about who should enjoy what can be a failing strategy. Texts that stand the test of time do so because they are well written and broadly engaged with themes that are of interest to most human beings.

Jane Austen has been mentioned in a lot of recent posts in this thread. I love and have read all of her published work, and I'm a cisgender dude. Why? Well, she's one of the most skilled, subtle satirists to have written in English. Her subtle skewering of social mannerisms, gendered relationships, and class assumptions remains relevant today; c.f. Bridgerton (e.g. Austen with less subtlety and more sex), or just about any good teen movie. Then, she somehow manages to pair satire with swoony romance. And she's a helluva wordsmith; the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice remains one of the great first lines in literature. Today, she is probably more popular with women readers than men, but has no shortage of fans among the latter, because quality wins out.

Or consider Tolkien's LotR. This is a text which is almost entirely concerned with a bunch of dudes on a mission, but there are probably as many female and non-binary LotR fans as male. Everyone can relate to the plucky underdogs standing up for what's right against an omnipresent malevolence, everyone loves a story about true friendship being put to the test, and mythic journeys resonate with all human beings.

I do think it is a mixture of both nature and nurture but people can also like what they like. I liked a lot of the romantic era writers when I was in high school and most of my favorite contemporary horror writers when I was coming of age in the 90s were women, and many of them were writing with a more romantic bent (it wasn't twilight in those days but Anne Rice really shaped a lot how people wrote 90s vampire stories so you have people like PN Elrod and Elaine Bergstrom putting out a lot of stuff).

You can write good books that are targeted at a particular definition of a particular audience. But I maintain that the best writers and best texts don't focus on such things. They just focus on telling good stories for all people.

I don't think this is true. I think you can be a great writer and also have an audience in mind. Not everything needs to be done that way. There are books that are more universal and there are books that are less. It is okay for there to be books or movies catering more to women or men. There are whole genres of television in the US for example that are geared towards women (like true crime). Same with police procedurals. Within that genre you can have great television writers operating, nothing is keeping a great writer from writing, and writing well, in that genre. People sometimes dismiss that genre as not significant. But I've been making a point of reading a lot of scripts lately and there is a lot more to these shows than people realize

 

[SteveC]

Some if it is also that we are different. And it is okay for men to gravitate towards certain things, for women to gravitate towards other things. It is also okay for people to like whatever they like.

Yeah, this is the core of it. It's okay to like what you like. When I was in college, I dated a woman who was a fellow English major but also really into romance novels. So I read some. And we discussed the style, story beats, and rules of the genre (and at the time, every book that I read followed these rules). What I discovered was that they just weren't for me because I wasn't the target audience, and I didn't have the ability to focus on the things that she enjoyed. And yet I remember that we both also enjoyed The Chronicles of Amber and Winter's Tale, not to mention the Silmarillion. We had big crossovers in taste, but in some cases, it didn't work.

And I expect there are plenty of people, regardless of gender, who cross over in terms of interest. We talked a lot about the romantic genre from an academic standpoint and what the authors were trying to do. I came away from the discussion realizing there was a lot going on in these novels, but they weren't for me. It wasn't a macho thing; it just meant they were written for someone who was looking for something different. There doesn't need to be any conflict here, coming from someone who reads a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but didn't know about this whole genre's existence until this thread.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This is basically flirting with becoming a nature/nurture debate, which is probably not going to prove super fruitful.

Well, as a Physics teacher I spend a lot of time fighting gender stereotypes. And as a scientist, I know the problem is 100% nurture.

 

[nyvinter]

I looked at Amazon for the top-selling Kindle books in the Fantasy genre, and I can see what the "rom-fantasy" folks are talking about.

Kindle Unlimited adds a lot of numbers, everyone that samples for free and don't finish is still counted.

Looking at the top 24 at SF-bok — Swedish SF/Fantasy/Horror bookstore — one fourth of the books there are Brandon Sanderson. Three are Yarros but it's only two titles, one Maas, and well, in total the romance fantasy judging from the covers are about seven and half of those are marked as books on sale.

There's Rothfuss, CL Clark, John Gwynne, Diana Wynne Jones, Moorcock, and Riordan. As well as a Dragonbane novel. Hardly doom and gloom about the genre — even if I personally think the dominance of Sanderson is quite boring.

 

[nyvinter]

Looking at the top 24 at SF-bok

That was the monthly bestselling list. I also sorted after best selling last year and these are the top 60 there. Even less doom and gloom, there's some really good books. But once again: far too many Sanderson books imo.

 

[Mournblade94]

Well, as a Physics teacher I spend a lot of time fighting gender stereotypes. And as a scientist, I know the problem is 100% nurture.

Fellow Scientist here. Molecular Biologist. Now a Biology and Chemistry educator for underpriviledged kids. It is in no way 100% nurture and the field of Sociogenomics is showing this quite clearly.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Fellow Scientist here. Molecular Biologist. Now a Biology and Chemistry educator for underpriviledged kids. It is in no way 100% nurture and the field of Sociogenomics is showing this quite clearly.

Being a scientist does not make you immune to religious dogma I guess.